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The West and the Truth of Sex

1978; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 20 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3684633

1527-2095

Michel Foucault, Lawrence E. Winters,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

At the end of the nineteenth century an unknown Englishman wrote an immense work, a dozen copies of which were printed. It was never put on sale, and it ended in the hands of a few collectors or in rare bookshops. One of the least known books, it is called My Secret Life. The author undertakes a meticulous narrative of a life which was essentially devoted to sexual pleasure. Night after night, day after day, he recounts, without ostentation or rhetoric, the least of his experiences, in the sole hope of expressing what occurrred, how it came about, and with what intensity and quality of sensation. Was this his only concern? Perhaps. For he often speaks of this task of the mundane details of his pleasure as a pure obligation. It is as if there were a secret and somewhat enigmatic obligation to which he could not avoid submitting: it is necessary to say everything. And yet there is something else; for this stubborn Englishman it is a question in this play-work of correctly combining pleasure, true discourse on pleasure and the pleasure particular to the utterance of this truth; it is a matter of involving the diary-whether he reads it aloud or writes it concurrently-in the course of sexual experiences, in accordance with the rules of certain strange pleasures in which reading and writing play a specific role. Stephen Marcus has devoted some remarkable pages to this obscure contemporary of Queen Victoria. 1 For my part, I am not particularly inclined to treat him as a person of the shadows, situated on some other side in an age of prudishness. Is it indeed a discrete and sneering revenge against the prudishness of the epoch? Above all, he seems to me to be situated at the point of convergence of three, scarecely secret, evolutionary lines in our society. The most recent is that which led medicine and psychiatry to a quasi-entomological interest in sexual practices, their variations, and all their disparity; KrafftEbing is in this lineage. 2 The second is older; it is what has inclined erotic literature, since R6tif and Sade, to seek its effects not only in the intensity or the rarity of the scenes which it imagined, but also in the relentless search for a certain truth of pleasure. An erotics of truth, a relationship of the true to the intense is characteristic of the new libertinage inaugurated at the end of the 18th century. The third line is the oldest; it runs through the entire Christian West since the Middle Ages. It is the strict obligation for everyone, through