College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Department of Religion
RELI 109 Homepage

Foucault Paper -- due April 12 at start of class

You are to pick ONE of the following options:
o

Option One OR Option Two

Option One

Foucault once said: “If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it does not only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression….” (“Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge, 119).

Your task in this paper is to investigate this ‘productive’ dimension of power for yourself and in your own life – remembering that ‘productive’ here does not mean that you or Foucault think it is a good thing!!

Step One

Step Two

Pick an example in your life where you are ‘brought to obey’ by the fact that power does not simply tell you ‘No,’ but instead or also says ‘Just do it.’ WORKING WITH YOUR PARTICULAR EXAMPLE, write a 5-8 page paper in which you explore how Foucault's view of power relations might help you see something in your own life. Look for three threads: how power 1) induces pleasure, 2) forms knowledge, and 3) produces discourse.

CAREFUL: You must cite Foucault substantially – that means: a lot AND thoughtfully: use his words to help you push your thoughts further.
Papers that do not cite Foucault at all will not be read and will earn an F. |
Papers that cite Foucault occasionally (twice or so) will not earn more than a C.

Some possible examples (You are NOT limited to these!!):

• Zero in on the complex relations between silence and speech: we are told NOT to talk about sex in certain places (with your parents, for example) SO THAT one can tell everything someplace else (with your friends, for example, or some kind of expert such as a doctor or self-help). Where do you not talk about sex and where do you talk about it – and why? Does the talking induce pleasure? Does the talking make you pursue knowledge?
  • What are the silences in your life about sexuality? Tell me some stories. Analyze them. Then think: what do these silences do? Try breaking one – what happens?
  • Education
  • Foucault says that the purpose of confession in religion might well be to absolve you of a feeling of wrong-doing – but it has the strange effect of getting you to think about particular kinds of wrong-doing, your capacity to do and be wrong, all the time. Keep a diary for three weeks in which you write everyday what your deepest innermost thoughts were about that day (or perhaps: what your sexual desires and thoughts and pleasures were – track down that body of pleasure and titillation!). You will NOT need to hand the diary in. What you want to do is reflect on that experience: what happened to you in the process? Did your sense of yourself change> If yes, how?
  • When relationships go wrong in our lives, we tend to blame others or ourselves: to think that there is something wrong that we need to ‘fix.’ This self-improvement – the idea that deep inside us there is something secretly wrong – is what produces the idea and sense that we have of a true self deep inside us: that we need to ‘fix’ and that we need to express. Describe how this works in your own life in terms of a specific example. If you were to make one small change that could help you see that, truly, there is nothing wrong with you or your life: what would it be? Can you try it and see?
  • Foucault says that we need to get free of the tyranny of sexual desire in favor of developing new ways of relating to our bodies and to pleasure – ways that do not get caught up in judging our desires and behaviors, our selves, as true or false, normal or sick. As a gay man, Foucault did that by trying to de-virilize sex, with its focus on penises and orgasm … as if orgasm was the only kind of real sex and everything else was less real, less true, as if sex had to revolve around the penis and orgasm for it to be really sex, as if our genitals were the only place/way to know pleasure and desire. Work against the fixation on penis and orgasm. Do something in the world that engages you with this. What might you do? Sky is the limit: stage a conversation with friends about this: what do we think ‘real’ sex is? Write me a short story re someone who wants to learn to experience sexual desire in other ways. Experiment with your own sex life (of whatever kind, including fantasy: what happens when you shift the focus off climax and orgasm)? 
  • Foucault says that wherever there is power, there is resistance. Think of Abnormal’s analysis of confession – that then produces the possessed nun, a body of titillations and pleasures, and eventually the neurological body!  Think of a time in your life when you felt under power’s sway (either its thumb or its seduction). How did you resist? What did that resistance lead to?
  • In Abnormal, Foucault argues that parents become parents by ensuring the security of their child’s sexuality. Pretend you are one of your parents: write yourself a letter in which you talk about what that parental role of securing healthy sexuality of your children meant for you? Alternatively, you could write this letter to your own child (real or imagined).

   

Option Two: Let’s get fictional!                

In History of Sexuality, Foucault wrote:

It is precisely this idea of sex in itself that we cannot accept without examination. Is ‘sex’ really the anchorage point that supports the manifestations of sexuality, or is it not rather a complex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality? One could show how this idea of sex took form in the different strategies of power and the definite role it played therein…. (152)

First, the notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere… Finally, the notion of sex brought about a fundamental reversal; it made it possible to invert the representation of the relationships of power to sexuality, causing the latter to appear, not in its essential and positive relation to power, but as being rooted in a specific and irreducible urgency which power tries as best as it can to dominate; thus the idea of sex makes it possible to evade what gives power its power; it enables one to conceive power solely as law and taboo. Sex – that agency which appears to dominate us and that secret which seems to underlie all that we are, that point which enthralls us through the power it manifests and the meaning it conceals, and which we ask to reveal what we are and to free us from what defines us – is doubtless but an ideal point … (154-155).

In the first week of class, we talked about how much more complicated people’s experiences of sexuality and gender were than the language we have for them. We talked about the many different things that sex can be about for people: lust, emotions, family, desire, object choice. That is one way to understand what Foucault is saying in the quotations above: we think sex is one thing and that is physical – but in fact it is many and might well be “the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element” in a complex experience “organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures” (155).

Write a 5-8 page essay in which you explore what sex is for you.
Be careful: You can’t earn your grade by your sex practices! So: you will earn your grade by your argument. In your argument, you MUST MUST MUST engage with the Foucault readings.

Paper #1 is worth 25% of your final grade!