MICHEL FOUCAULT: A
MARCUSEAN IN
STRUCTURALIST CLOTHING

Joel Whitebook

ABSTRACT

Foucault’s rejection of the repressive hypothesis is generally taken

as a critique of Freud. Its real target is, however, the left Freudian tradition,
which received its paradigmatic articulation in the work of Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse sought to show that the conflict between the repressive demands of
civilization and instinctual desires of the individual didn’t represent a trans-
historical state of affairs, as Freud maintained. He argues, rather, that it rep-
resents a particular historical constellation that can be transcended. Foucault
purports to reject the entire structure in which the problem arises, that is, the
conflict between the demands of civilization and bodily based desire. The thesis
of this article is, however, that he doesn’t reject the conflict, but simply dis-
places it. In his scheme, the displaced conflict takes place between the appar-
atus of sexuality and bodies and pleasures. Furthermore, Foucault maintains
that the emancipation of bodies and pleasures from their entrapment in the
apparatus of sexuality constitutes the desirable political program. The diagnosis
of the situation and the suggested political remedy are, in other words, exactly
parallel to Marcuse’s.

KEYWORDS

civilization • Foucault • Freud • Marcuse • sexuality

I

The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, represents Foucault’s attempt to exorcise

the specter of psychoanalysis. Characteristically, however, he doesn’t try to
accomplish this feat through a frontal encounter with the substance of the
Freudian position. Rather, he attempts an end run around Freud by trying to
trump psychoanalysis, as a theoretical and practical project, through an
archaeological-genealogical reduction of its significance. This reduction will

Thesis Eleven, Number 71, November 2002: 52–70
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd
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pave the way for Foucault to formulate a counter-project, namely, ‘the aes-
thetics of existence’.

In The Order of Things, Foucault had disingenuously praised psycho-

analysis as an exemplary counter-science (Foucault, 1994: 373–9). But in The
History of Sexuality, Vol. I, the pretense is dropped, and he assumes an overtly
disparaging attitude towards Freud. Now, rather than being presented as a
critical counter-science, which could guide the archaeological attack on
humanism, psychoanalysis is seen as perhaps the most invidious form of
humanism and becomes the object of archaeological scrutiny. However, if
Foucault’s opposition towards psychoanalysis is unmistakable, the attack
itself is anything but direct. Indeed, it is the most tortuous of all Foucault’s
encounters with Freud, proceeding more through derision, innuendo and
irony than through argument. It is peculiar that in a book purporting to be
an ‘archaeology of psychoanalysis’ (Foucault, 1978: 130), psychoanalytic texts
are rarely discussed and Freud is hardly mentioned by name. Furthermore,
in a move that strains the reader’s credulity, psychoanalysis isn’t even pre-
sented as the major episode in what Foucault calls ‘the deployment of sexu-
ality’ – itself part of the power/knowledge apparatus – as one would expect.
Instead, it is relegated to one minor episode in that entire history. This is
strange. For whether one celebrates or deplores psychoanalysis, it seems hard
to deny the sheer magnitude of Freud’s impact. But it would grant too much
power to Freud for Foucault even to let him play the devil.

John Forrester rightly observes that the obliqueness of the attack on

Freud and the minimizing subsumption of psychoanalysis under the deploy-
ment of sexuality give the book an ‘odd, refracted and displaced’ character.
He ‘senses’, moreover, these oddities represent ‘tactical cunning’ devices on
Foucault’s part which require ‘comment, if not explanation’ (Forrester, 1990:
289). Unfortunately, however, Forrester – perhaps because of his idealization
of Foucault – isn’t able to pursue his sound intuition further and examine the
ends Foucault’s tactical stratagems are meant to serve. Jacques-Alain Miller,
on the other hand, can. As a practicing psychoanalyst, he has more reason
to spot the aggression coming his way and is therefore better able to untangle
what Foucault is up to. In a roundtable discussion that included Foucault,
Miller states his thesis directly: Foucault is ‘using a complex strategy’ that will
enable him ‘to erase the break that is located with Freud’ (Foucault, 1980a:
211–12). And Foucault doesn’t deny it. In a significant exchange, Miller
presses Foucault on the artificiality of assimilating Freud to the deployment
of sexuality:

MILLER: It’s a matter of appearances, is that what you are telling us?
FOUCAULT: Not a delusive appearance, but a fabrication.
MILLER: Right, and so it’s motivated by what you want, or hope, you’re . . .
FOUCAULT: Correct, and that’s where the polemical or political objective comes
in. But as you know, I never go in for polemics, and I’m a good distance away
from politics. (Foucault, 1980a: 211–12)

Whitebook: Michel Foucault

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Having dropped all aspirations of scientific disinterestedness, Foucault’s

history of the present is apparently free to adopt whatever standpoint it needs
– in this case the deployment of sexuality – to fabricate an account that suits
his political purposes. Because of this, it isn’t entirely accurate for Foucault
to claim that he doesn’t participate in polemics. It would be more correct to
say that he doesn’t participate in polemics directly, but uses historical and
theoretical discourse and a good deal of rhetoric to pursue – and obscure –
his polemical intentions. This submerged polemical intent is one of the major
contributors to the odd, refracted and displaced character of The History of
Sexuality, Vol. I, referred to by Forrester. In The Order of Things Foucault had,
with the help of his particular version of psychoanalysis, tried to foresee the
next epistemic break, entailing as it did the death of man; and despite his
attempt to present himself as a neutral archaeologist, he obviously favored
this impending epistemic break. In Volume One, as J.-A. Miller observes, it is
the death of psychoanalysis that is being predicted – and promoted – by
Foucault’s archaeological criticisms. Like humanism, of which it may be the
foremost expression, psychoanalysis is seen as belonging to a contingent
historical structure whose time is (hopefully) passing (quoted in Foucault,
1980a: 211).

The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, occupies a strange transitional, and tran-

sitory, position in Foucault’s oeuvre, in which one of the central problemat-
ics in his thinking – the question of limits and their transgression – appears
at last to have played itself out. The idea of writing such a history was not
something that had only recently occurred to Foucault in 1975, resulting, as
one might think, from his experience with the post-’68 milieu in Paris or with
the Gay Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. (They were no doubt the
immediate causes that led him to take up the actual composition of the book
at that point.) He told an interviewer that he had been thinking about such
a project ‘from the moment’ he ‘began writing the “History of Madness” ’, and,
indeed, that he considered the two books ‘twin projects’. This remark belies
the claim that Madness and Civilization represents an anomalous early work
that Foucault quickly moved beyond. What united these two projects was the
question of ‘how the normal and the pathological are divided’ (cited in Miller,
1993: 251), a variation on the theme of limits and transgression. In the 14
years separating Madness and Civilization and the beginning of what would
be his final project, Foucault had been doing continuous research on the
history of sexuality and had collected copious material on such topics as
masturbation, incest, hysteria, perversion and eugenics.

Foucault, however, was apparently not satisfied with the various

accounts he gave of the problem of limits and their transgression. Further-
more, in addition to the theoretical considerations, he also became disillu-
sioned with ‘the politics of transgression’ as they manifested themselves in
Maoist terrorism and the Iranian Revolution. As a result, Foucault now
adapted a new theoretical strategy: He tried to undercut the structure of

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thought within which the question of transgression arises in the first place.
What I am referring to is Foucault’s claim, which lies at the center of the first
volume of The History of Sexuality, to have refuted the ‘repressive hypothe-
sis’. But what is the repressive hypothesis, after all, if not another name for
Freud’s transhistorical thesis – which received its canonical formulation in
Civilization and its Discontents – that the requirements of civilization are
inevitably opposed to the demands of human sexuality (and aggression) and
therefore must repress the latter (Freud, 1930)? In Madness and Civilization,
Foucault had accepted the validity of the repressive hypothesis – at least with
respect to modernity – and then tried to find a radical solution from within
it, namely, the valorization of madness. Now, he challenges the hypothesis
itself. Were he successful in this approach, Foucault would have rid himself
of the question of limits and transgression and the challenge of psycho-
analysis at the same time. The refutation is, however, more apparent than
real.

II

Foucault likes to begin his books with a stunning rhetorical gesture that

grabs the reader’s attention. In the first chapter of Madness and Civilization,
we encountered the haunting image of the Ship of Fools gliding ‘along the
calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals’ (Foucault, 1988: vii) in
what was a voyage of simultaneous expulsion and purification. Similarly, The
Order of Things begins with a burst of philosophical laughter provoked by a
reading from Borges’ fantastic Chinese encyclopedia (Foucault, 1994: xvii).
The point of the passage is, to dramatize the sheer contingency of all categori-
cal schemes – especially our own. And what reader can forget the excruci-
ating account of Damiens’ torture and execution, which provides the overture
for Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1979)? It is meant to recall the real terror
that has been masked by the rationalized world of the Panopticon.

In this regard, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, is no exception. Foucault

begins the book by flying in the face of the conventional claim that the Vic-
torians were, as it were, not Victorian – if by ‘Victorian’ we mean puritanical
and sexually repressed. In addition to challenging the received image of late
19th century culture and morality, this assertion was also meant to provoke
the established Freudian left, the désirants who dominated the French intel-
lectual scene after 1968, and whose partisans included some of Foucault’s
closest friends.

The claim about the Victorians is at the center of Foucault’s larger rejec-

tion of the repressive hypothesis, which held that, from the 18th century
onward, modern European history has involved the increasing repression of
sexuality. Conservative and left Freudians took the hypothesis as an accurate
description of the historical trajectory of the last several centuries. But whereas
the conservatives have thought the state of affairs was unchangeable, the

Whitebook: Michel Foucault

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Freudian left believed that sexual repression could and, moreover, should be
undone. For them, emancipation consists in the lifting of that repression and
the liberation of sexuality from repressive power. Foucault, however, doesn’t
even believe the hypothesis is accurate as a description. Rather than experi-
encing a steady increase in repression which peaked in the Victorian age,
modernity has, he argues, witnessed an ‘institutional incitement to speak
about’ sex and a ‘multiplication of discourses concerning’ it. Moreover, he
maintains this discursive explosion has occurred in the service of power.

On this interpretation, Frank Harris’s My Secret Life – with its catalogu-

ing, categorizing and dissecting of all the details of his sexual experience –
no longer appears as a courageous anomaly in Victorian society, but as an
exemplary work. Furthermore, Harris’s compulsion to articulate the minutiae
of his sexual life wasn’t something new, but the result of a force that ‘had
been lodged in the heart of modern man for over two centuries’ (Foucault,
1978: 22–3) and which was essentially bound up with the creation of the
modern subject. It may have become secularized, scientized, intensified in
modernity, but the genealogy of this compulsion to put sex into words can
be traced back to the early Christian era – to what Foucault calls ‘pastoral
power’.

As he had done earlier with the asylum, the clinic and the prison,

Foucault links the rise of a new form of institutional confinement, namely,
the monastery, with the emergence of new forms of power and discourse.
Although he would later trace the deployment of sexuality’s precursors even
further back into the Greek and Roman period, the formation of the monastic
life nevertheless constitutes a crucial episode in the crystallization of the
‘hermeneutics of the self’. For it instituted the demand for the constant and
methodical scrutiny of one’s inner world and desires. The connection
between the new forms of subjection, subjectification and internalization can
be seen, Foucault argues, in the battle for chastity, championed by Cassian,
an early theorist of monastic life. Whereas the struggle against fornication
was primarily concerned with one’s outward behavior, the battle for chastity,
introduced in the monasteries, directs itself at the purity of a person’s
thoughts – even including involuntary nocturnal thoughts, that is, dreams.
Indeed, Cassian goes so far as to make ‘the absence of erotic dreams and
nocturnal pollution a sign that one has reached the pinnacle of chastity’
(Foucault, 1997: 192).

What is most important about the rise of monasticism is not merely that

the number and intensity of prohibitions increases, but that the prohibited
thoughts – that is, the representations of desire – now become a target for
control. ‘The most important moment of transgression’ shifted, as Foucault
puts it, from the performance of the act ‘to the stirrings – so difficult to
perceive and formulate – of desire’. What is significantly new ‘is a whole
technique for analyzing and diagnosing thought, its origins, its qualities its
dangers, its potential for temptation and all the dark forces that can lurk

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behind the mask it may assume through “endless self-questioning” ’
(Foucault, 1997: 194–5).

When the Lateran Council prescribed a yearly confession for all

members of the Church in 1215, these techniques of self-scrutiny were
exported from the monastery to the larger Christian population. Since then,
Foucault claims, the West has been ‘a singularly confessing society’ (Foucault,
1978: 59). Foucault attempts to insinuate guilt by association by assimilating
psychoanalysis to the confession. Already in his description of the Church’s
practice of confession, Foucault continually alludes to Freud – indeed, he
uses almost exact Freudian terms –without mentioning psychoanalysis by
name. Not so subtly, he tries to convey the impression that psychoanalysis
merely represents a variation – and a relatively minor one at that – of the
techniques developed in the monastery. Thus, for example, he describes the
evolution of confessional techniques as a movement from the investigation
of explicit behavior – sexual acts, positions, climaxes and so on – to the
interrogation of what an analyst would call fantasy life, that is, ‘thoughts,
desires [and] voluptuous imaginings’, and, naturally, dreams.

Like Freud’s requirement that nothing must escape examination, no

matter how trivial it may appear, Foucault observes that these interrogations
must be ‘pursued down to their slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a
daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity
between the body’s mechanics and the mind’s complacency’ (Foucault, 1978:
19). And in an unmistakable allusion to the ‘fundamental rule’ of psycho-
analysis and the injunction to ‘put it into words’, Foucault writes, ‘The Chris-
tian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty, the task of passing everything
having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech’ (Foucault, 1978:
21). The confessional interrogations were not, of course, pursued gratu-
itously, but with a particular goal in mind: to transform and control desire
itself. Foucault observes that the ultimate aim was to redirect it away from
the temptations of the flesh and re-channel it towards a spiritual object,
namely, God – processes that invite comparison with displacement and sub-
limation.

The terminology of current psychoanalytic controversies – partly

because they derive, in no small part, from Foucault’s enormous influence
on the zeitgeist – can be used to clarify the exact nature of Foucault’s claims.
He is arguing that the desires examined in the confession are not simply
‘found’ in the penitent’s soul, but, are, in a strong sense, ‘created’ by the con-
fessional process itself. It would be one thing to say that certain pre-existing
desires in the penitent are uncovered and then elaborated and even multi-
plied by the process itself. (This could be taken as an accurate description
of the psychoanalytic process.) But Foucault is saying something more,
namely, that they are ‘implanted’, to use his important term, in the believer’s
soul by the confessor.

Let us be clear about Foucault’s thesis, for he will repeat it with respect

Whitebook: Michel Foucault

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to the distinction of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’. Through suggestiveness and stimu-
lation of the confessional process, pastoral power implants particular desires
in the penitent’s soul so that it can later take hold of and manipulate them.

In the 18th century, there arose a new form of power, bio-power, which

adopted and transformed confessional techniques for its own purposes.
Foucault argues that because it required a steady source of workers for its
factories and consumers for its economy, the emerging capitalist order had
to assert control over the growth and maintenance of the population. Science
and technology had significantly reduced famine and disease, and now it
became necessary to intervene at the level of the human body in order to
regulate reproduction. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault had analyzed how
the body was mechanized and disciplined by the new institutions of mod-
ernity – that is, secondary schools, military barracks and workshops. Now,
in The History of Sexuality, he describes how it will be regulated through the
establishment of a number of medical, administrative and social welfare
agencies, all concerned with the maintenance of health and the reproduction
of the population. Most importantly, bio-power seeks to create a population
whose sexual and familial life is organized in such a way it will reliably repro-
duce itself and socialize the young in a way which will provide workers and
consumers for the economy. Through the interventions of its regulatory
agencies, it seeks to bring about changes that will steer the population into
conformity with its statistically determined requirements. This means that it
must employ techniques to move the statistically deviant in the direction of
the norm – that is, to normalize them.

The techniques bio-power employs to accomplish its ends, however,

are, according to Foucault, not necessarily negative. In one of his most
famous claims, Foucault argues that power isn’t basically a form of ‘anti-
energy’, but is in fact ‘productive’ (Foucault, 1978: 85). Rather than using
repression or coercion to achieve its goals, bio-power constantly generates
and stimulates new forces and desires with the aim of appropriating and
steering them in the required direction.

1

The Scientia Sexualis, encompass-

ing sexology, demography, psychiatry, psychology, and, later, psychoanalysis
– which came into its own in the 19th century – constituted the form of know-
ledge that corresponded to the emergence of bio-power. This new science
took over the techniques of pastoral power and adapted them for the require-
ments of a different form of power. ‘The moral theology of concupiscence’
was transformed into ‘the theoretical discourse on sex’; the preoccupation
with sin and transgression into the new categorization of the normal and the
pathological; and the process of confession into the clinical interview. And
while sex remained ‘a privileged theme of confession . . . from the Christian
penance to the present day’, there was an important change. Until the 19th
century, the sexual material generated by confessional practices was never
recorded, but ‘dematerialized’ as soon as it was spoken. And this suited ‘the
purposes of the Christian pastor’ adequately, for confession was ‘a ritual in

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which the expression alone’ produces ‘intrinsic modifications in the person
who articulates it’ (Foucault, 1978: 61–2). But with the rise of the modern
sexologists, pedagogues and especially the psychiatrists the ‘whole pitiful,
lyrical outpouring from the sexual mosaic’ produced by confessional tech-
niques was released from its ‘old juridico-religious’ (Foucault, 1978: 64)
function and registered, codified and systematized – that is, turned into the
putative science of sexuality. The scientific status of these practices is what
Foucault contests.

In a comparison he later acted as naive, Foucault contrasts the Scienta

Sexualis, as he calls them, with the more exotic forms of sexuality he thought
were practiced in traditional cultures. The ars erotica supposedly employed
erotic techniques to intensify pleasure and gain access to esoteric truth, that
is, wisdom. Diotima would count as a prime example here. The Scientia
Sexualis, in contrast, is allied with power and generates the sort of objectifi-
able truth that can be used for social engineering. Like its precursor, the con-
fessional, the clinical interview does not gather objective data about the
interviewee’s pre-existing sexual desires. Once again, it implants those
desires in the subject. The interview actually arouses those ‘polymorphous’
desires in the individual so that they can later be ‘extracted from people’s
bodies’, catalogued in administrative dossiers and case studies, and exploited
by power/knowledge. Power, as Judith Butler observes, ‘requires the field of
bodily impulse to expand and proliferate . . . such that it will continually
have fresh material through which to articulate’ itself. ‘Hence, repression
produces a field of infinitely moralizable bodily phenomena in order to facili-
tate and rationalize its own proliferation’ (Butler, 1997: 58). Foucault there-
fore doesn’t only reject the idea that ‘nineteenth-century “bourgeois” society’
was repressive. He also claims – even more audaciously – that it ‘was a
society of blatant and fragmented perversion’ (Foucault, 1978: 47). ‘Putting
sex into discourse’ – the effect of Scientia Sexualis – led to an ‘increasing
incitement . . . dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities’
and ‘has initiated sexual heterogeneities’ (Foucault, 1978: 37). It has
amounted, in short, to a virtual sexualization of the culture. This is what he
means by the ‘perverse implantation’.

The distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ – or ‘the deployment of

“sexuality” ’ – is another key element of Foucault’s position. It is important
to distinguish his view of this distinction from a more conventional psycho-
analytic way of parsing it. What Foucault is calling ‘sex’ is generally taken to
refer to the ‘naturally given’ (Foucault, 1978: 106) dimension of our sexual
life that is rooted in one’s biological make-up and therefore transhistorical.
And ‘sexuality’ is usually understood as the part that is socially and histori-
cally constructed on it. As Foucault himself describes this conventional view,
‘sex’ would be seen as ‘the anchorage point that supports the [constructions]
of sexuality’ (Foucault, 1978: 152). Psychoanalytically oriented social theorists
have argued for decades, and continue to argue, about the precise relation

Whitebook: Michel Foucault

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between the naturally given and the constructed parts of our sexual lives,
with conservative theorists tending to assign more weight to the former, and
progressives to the latter.

We must appreciate how thoroughgoing Foucault’s constructivism is.

He is not simply arguing, like many left-wing Freudians, that the largest
portion of our sexual life is socially constructed and therefore historically con-
tingent and mutable. He is claiming rather that the existence of a biological
substratum is virtually an illusion.

2

It is a construction of ‘the deployment of

sexuality’. The new Scientia Sexualis, motivated by power, must posit the
existence of sex, which exists by nature, to legitimate itself. ‘Sex’, in other
words, is the pseudo-object of the pseudo-science of sexuality. It is, ‘in fact,
an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality’ (Foucault,
1978: 106). ‘Sexuality’, in contrast,

is the name given to a historical construct, not a furtive reality that is difficult
to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the
intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special
knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one
another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge power.
(Foucault, 1978: 105–6)

Sexuality, in short, comes completely from the outside.

If psychoanalysis embodies an ethic of avowal, then Foucault’s thesis

of the perverse implantation represents a reversal of the psychoanalytic
position. As Hans Loewald has argued, a psychoanalytic ethos enjoins us to
accept responsibility for – that is, to own, to the greatest possible extent –
our inner world of impulses and fantasies, our destructive and sadistic as well
as our sexual wishes (however injurious they are to our self-esteem) and not
to deny them through externalization onto the outside world (Loewald, 1978:
25ff). Insofar as it pictures ‘heterodox’ sexuality as coming from the outside,
then, the perverse implantation constitutes an instance of disavowal, of dis-
owning, in the strict psychoanalytic sense. Given Loewald’s claim – of which
Foucault was presumably unaware – it is significant that Foucault interprets
the development of confessional techniques in terms of progressive expan-
sion of the process of avowal. He argues that ‘the evolution of the word
avowal . . . and of the legal function it designated is itself emblematic of’ the
development of the confession as a major vehicle for ‘individualization by
power’. In pre-modern societies, where the group tends to take precedence
over the individual, ‘avowal’ refers to its responsibility for the ‘status, identity
and value’ of its members. For example, if a member of a tribe kills someone,
the tribe is responsible. But with the advance of modernization and the dis-
embedding of the individual from the collective – from the ‘social substance’,
to use Marx’s phrase – the term increasingly came ‘to signify someone’s
acknowledgment of his own actions and thoughts’. Through confessional
‘methods of interrogation and inquest’, religious as well as civil, individuals

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Whitebook: Michel Foucault

61

were, Foucault argues, increasingly compelled to assume responsibility for
their inner worlds and the actions that ensued from them (Foucault, 1978:
57–9).

Unlike Kant, Weber and Freud, Foucault does not applaud this develop-

ment as an advance from heteronomy to autonomy. Rather, he believes it
represents a new and more insidious form of heteronomous determination
from the outside – now implanted in the inside. Foucault’s argument hearkens
back to his analysis of conscience in Madness and Civilization, where he
criticized the modern asylum for its interiorization, or to put it more para-
doxically, its psychologization of madness. What Foucault objected to about
the humanist reforms in 19th century psychiatry was that madness ceased to
pertain to both ‘body and soul’, and ‘was now inscribed within the dimen-
sion of interiority’. While the older madhouse may have practiced overt
physical brutality, the supposedly progressive asylum did something perhaps
even more pernicious: it ‘organized’ the madman’s guilt ‘as a consciousness
of himself’, thereby replacing the ‘free terror of madness [with] the stifling
anguish of responsibility’ (Foucault, 1988: 247).

It is odd that Foucault, the former champion of transgression, takes such

a position. In externalizing ‘heterodox’ sexuality (and madness), as if there
were something unacceptable about it, he seems to tacitly accept its con-
ventional stigmatization. For Freud, sexual perversion – which for the present
purposes can be taken as non-canonical heterosexual activity – is the out-
growth of infantile sexuality. And insofar as we were all infants and our early
experience remains inscripted within us, we are all, to one extent or another,
perverse. To be sure, a number of normalizing analysts have taken a moral-
izing and condemnatory attitude towards perversion. Psychoanalysis’ scien-
tific or naturalistic heritage, however, ought not only to promote an attitude
of tolerance, but, more importantly, of avowal – of ownership – as well.
Psychoanalysis’ radicalism rejects the conventional society’s moralism and
disavowal of infantile sexuality. It strives, rather, to acknowledge and inte-
grate the unconscious-instinctual to the fullest possible extent. Foucault can’t
make up his mind. Is heterodox sexuality something internal, which is
opposed to the normalizing forces of society? This claim would reinstate the
repressive hypothesis. Or is it something bad, which society implants in us
and that we have to repudiate?

III

Foucault pursues a two-fold strategy in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I.

He presents himself as an anti-psychoanalytic anti-utopian thinker who is
offering a new post-liberationist form of politics. But at the same time as he
tries to repudiate the Freudian left by attacking the relatively crude position
of Wilhelm Reich, he borrows the arguments of one of its other major figures,
Herbert Marcuse, without acknowledging the debt. Foucault, at this stage of

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Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

his career, is in fact a Marcusean in structuralist clothing – with, I should add,
a sado-masochistic twist. The logic of Eros and Civilization provides the
structure for Foucault’s argument in Vol. I (Marcuse, 1966).

As we have seen, the repressive hypothesis envisions an inevitable

conflict between two elements: the repressing forces of organized social life
– the reality principle, the symbolic, power, the law of the father and so on,
and a repressed quasi-natural substratum – the pleasure principle, as desire,
the drives, the feminine, etc. At this point, the details of the various formu-
lations of the repressive hypothesis need not concern us. What is important
is its general logic.

Freud and the Freudian right (including Lacan) accept the repressive

hypothesis as accurately describing the deep structure of civilized social life
and therefore see it as transhistorical and inescapable. The Freudian left, on
the other hand, while it agrees that the hypothesis is an accurate description
of patriarchal civilization to date, maintains that it only applies to one con-
tingent phase of history. In other words, it is mutable. From the 1930s through
the 1970s, the Freudian left generally argued that repression is the result of
modern capitalist society, which could and should be overthrown. When he
argued in Madness and Civilization that modern power and rationality
necessarily repressed – or ‘excluded’ – madness, Foucault himself subscribed
to a form of the repressive hypothesis.

The Freudian tradition, across the entire political spectrum, has been

marked by a certain epistemic heroism. And one of the aims of Foucault’s
critique of the repressive hypothesis is to debunk that heroic image. Viewed
positively, psychoanalysis has been seen as waging a difficult struggle against
our most fundamental (and consoling) self-deceptions. All our attempts to
gain knowledge of the repressed are dynamically opposed and necessarily
encounter formidable resistance, which is to say, they are dynamically
opposed. Their uncovering demands exceptional effort and the endurance
of considerable discomfort by both parties. The fact of this resistance does
indeed make the subject matter of psychoanalysis that which ‘is most diffi-
cult to tell’. And although Foucault intends it sarcastically, it is not entirely
an exaggeration when he describes the insights pursued by psychoanalysis
as, if not ‘unbearable’, at least ‘hazardous’ (Foucault, 1978: 53).

The Freudian right and the Freudian left more or less agree on the

nature of resistance and the arduousness of the psychoanalytic pursuit of
insight. But they disagree on the fate of those repressed truths once they are
uncovered. Freud and conservative Freudians believe the best one can hope
for is the relative reduction of repression and the sublimation and integration
of the formerly repressed material into a richer and more flexible form of ego
organization. The Freudian left, in contrast, holds out for a more radical
solution: an end to repression and the release of the repressed directly into
daily life. For them, this constitutes emancipation. This is the position
Foucault holds up for ridicule.

04 Whitebook (jr/d) 11/20/02 1:36 PM Page 62

While Reich and Marcuse pursue the same basic left Freudian strategy,

there is a crucial difference between them. Reich accepts a conventional
Freudian view, which sees genitality as the culmination of ideal psychosex-
ual development. In a rather simplistic hydraulic conception, he views
orgasmic potency as the main sign of psychic well-being. His diagnosis and
his solution are straightforward, to say the least: Capitalism necessarily
represses orgasmic potency and a socialist society would free it. Marcuse, in
contrast, rejects the Freudian scheme of development, and views genitality
as a repressive form of sexual organization. It requires the sacrifices of ‘poly-
morphous perversity’ and the pre-genital stages of development to genital
supremacy. Polymorphous perversity is a concept the early Freud used to
refer to the unformed sexuality of the child before the component drives are
integrated into genitality and brought under the dominance of the reality prin-
ciple (and the ego). The child’s entire body is, at this stage, presumably eroti-
cized. Whereas genitality operates under the sign of the reality principle,
polymorphous perversity somehow eludes its reach and, with it, the reach
of socialization. For Marcuse, polymorphous perversity constitutes a pre-social
– unformed yet formable – material that has not yet been shaped and deter-
mined by the unifying forces of the reality principle.

Marcuse pursues his strategy by attempting to ‘de-ontologize’, which is

to say historicize the reality principle. To this end, he introduces two corre-
lated sets of distinctions: between the basic reality principle and the perform-
ance principle, on the one hand, and between necessary repression and
surplus repression, on the other. The basic reality principle is ‘by nature’ and
refers to the renunciation, however minimal, that will always be required to
negotiate the metabolism between humanity and the external world, regard-
less of how thoroughly outer nature may have been mastered. The ‘perform-
ance principle’, in contrast, is ‘by convention’, which is to say, is historically
constructed. It is a term Marcuse introduces to designate ‘the prevailing
historical form of the reality principle ’ (Marcuse, 1966: 35) that operates in
advanced societies. He argues that, in such societies, where modern science
and technology have the potential to create unprecedented abundance,
shorten the working day and ameliorate the struggle for existence, the exten-
siveness of actual repression and renunciation is not the result of natural
necessity. Rather, it results from the maintenance of a system of political and
economic domination.

The distinction between necessary repression and surplus repression is

meant to designate the difference ‘between the biological and the historical
sources of human suffering’ (Marcuse, 1966: 88). Necessary repression, which
pertains to the phylogenetic dimension of human existence, refers to the
degree of repression and renunciation necessitated by the basic reality
principle. This is precisely the natural and non-constructed component of
human sexuality that Foucault wants to deny. And surplus repression – obvi-
ously modeled on Marx’s notion of ‘surplus labor’ – refers to the superfluous

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renunciation imposed by the performance principle. Marcuse’s claim is that
the vast preponderance of renunciation and suffering experienced today is
the result of surplus, that is to say, unnecessary repression and the insti-
tutionalization of the performance principle. It is therefore historically con-
tingent and eliminable.

To complete his case, Marcuse must also show that the human drives

can be formed – or constructed – in a radically different way. In order to do
this, he takes over a concept from Freud, but assigns it much greater weight
than it had in the Freudian theory. ‘The mutability of the instincts’ refers to
the fact that one component of the drive is, if not promiscuous, at least poly-
valent. In ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’, Freud identified the various com-
ponents of the drive. Its ‘source’ and ‘pressure’ are rooted in the body, that
is, in biology, and are therefore the least constructable component of the
drive. The object, however, is the ‘most variable’ component and therefore
the most constructable.

3

If one is interested in combating the biological deter-

minist and emphasizing the constructivist tendencies in Freud from within
his own theory, this – along with the theory of polymorphous perversity – is
certainly one place to look. Marcuse radically de-emphasizes the significance
of the source and pressure and elevates the object into the almost exclusive
component of the drive. The main difference between Marcuse and Foucault
on this point is not one of principle but of degree. Foucault wants to elimi-
nate the natural, unconstructed dimension of ‘sex’ completely. Marcuse wants
to reduce it to a relatively negligible minimum. Both, however, insist on the
overwhelming weight of the constructed factor in determining the nature of
our sexual lives.

The ‘political program’, which Marcuse made explicit in the 1960s – and

which provided the prototype for the psychoanalytically informed move-
ments of the day – was, if not eschatological, at least radically utopian.

4

Because the forces of production had developed immeasurably further under
capitalism than Marx had ever imagined, the long transitional phase of social-
ist accumulation he had envisioned would not be necessary. It was possible,
Marcuse argued, to move directly to a ‘communist’ society, where the amount
of time and energy necessary to negotiate the basic reality principle would
be reduced to a minimum. This would, in turn, make it possible to eliminate
surplus repression and emancipate the polymorphous perverse dimension of
human sexuality that had remained loyal to the pleasure principle. For
Marcuse, then, the realm of freedom doesn’t just lie beyond onerous toil, as
it had for Marx, but beyond sexual repression as well. Moreover, because of
its polymorphous, which is to say, unformed and malleable nature, this lib-
erated sexuality could be socially constructed in a radically new way. ‘The
germ of a different reality principle’ (Marcuse, 1966: 169) – intimated in per-
versions, symptoms, fantasies and myths – could then be translated into social
practice and become the basis for a qualitatively new form of life. Given
Foucault’s later concept of the ‘aesthetics of existence’, it is noteworthy that

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Marcuse turned to ‘the aesthetic dimension’ to explicate this new ethos.
Finally, we should point out that, for Marcuse, this sort of utopianism wasn’t
just ‘utopian’, in the sense of being unrealistic.

Only a critique that penetrated the depths of the psyche, where the

reign of the reality principle was not secure, would be adequate for under-
mining the one-dimensional world of advanced capitalist societies – a world
bearing a strong resemblance to the one described by Foucault in Discipline
and Punish. Anything less radical, Marcuse believed, would only serve to
strengthen that systematically self-reinforcing totality. Only a ‘Great Refusal’,
as he called it – which holistically challenged the existing system – would be
commensurate with the totalizing nature of one-dimensional society.

IV

This, then, was exactly the sort of theoretical and political program that

Foucault ostensibly sets out to repudiate as a tough-minded genealogist, freed
from romantic illusions – that is, as an arch anti-utopian. He argues that the
‘historico-political critique of sexual repression’ that developed ‘around Reich
. . . between the two world wars’, and continued into the 1970s, was funda-
mentally misguided (Foucault, 1978: 131). By assuming that power always
requires the repression of sex, the Freudian left could convince itself that, in
its personal struggles for sexual freedom, it was ipso facto struggling against
power. Mocking their naïveté, John Forrester observes that the left-wing psy-
choanalysts believed ‘that truth is a means of liberation, that truth is always
on the side of the repressed, of the oppressed, of the dominated – a final
consolation for God’s always being on the side of the big battalions’ (For-
rester, 1990: 306–7). We should be clear about the extent of Foucault’s criti-
cisms. He isn’t just rejecting the proposition that ‘by saying yes to sex, one
says no to power’ – a proposition that conflates sexual repression and
political repression – as mistaken. He goes further and claims that the anti-
repressive struggle is itself actually a ‘ruse’ of power. It not only misses the
fundamental point and remains ‘within the deployment of sexuality’ instead
of operating ‘outside or against it’, but also, by ‘putting sex into discourse’,
the struggle against repression in fact advances the stratagem of power. It is
one more ‘incitement’ to speak about sex (Foucault, 1978: 131, 12).

5

The Freudian left’s position, according to Foucault, rested on an anach-

ronistic and therefore inaccurate model that pictured power as essentially
negative – as an ‘anti-energy’, as the ‘power to say no’ (Foucault, 1978: 85).
Because they failed to appreciate the emergence of bio-power, which, as we
have seen, is essentially productive, the left Freudians continued to operate
with a ‘juridico-discursive’ conception that belongs to an earlier phase of
historical development. According to the law of the father-sovereign, the
same ‘monotonous’ repressive scheme functions throughout the whole hier-
archical organization of society, in the state, the family and the individual,

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prohibiting the sex-desire of his subordinates, inaugurating continuous cycles
of transgression and punishment. This conception gives rise to the notion
that desire is outside power and is its Other. It leads to a liberationist politics
that valorizes transgressive desire and attempts to use it as an external
fulcrum in the struggle against power. Foucault insists that we must free our-
selves from the image of a monolithic opposition between the law and desire
– of a clearly delimited inside and an outside that is opposed to it – if we
are to understand how power actually functions in the microcosmically and
the macrocosmically. With the rise of a normalizing society, sex can no longer
be viewed as an external and intractable impediment to the functioning of
power. Rather, as we have seen, the deployment of sexuality has become
one of the major vehicles for the proliferation of bio-power and because the
incitements to sexuality are so multifarious and diffuse – ‘polymorphous’ –
there is no ‘headquarters that presides over’ (Foucault, 1978: 95) power
that could be stormed. It doesn’t make sense, to seek a counter-discourse,
outside the reach of power, which might lead to a Great Refusal. Instead,
Foucault claims that power has to be tracked through the diverse, anony-
mous and variegated capillaries through which it flows and confronted on a
local level.

The fundamental flaw of the Freudian left should now be apparent: by

focusing on the struggle against sexual repression, it made a mere ‘tactical
shift’ within ‘the deployment of sexuality’ and did not challenge that appar-
atus as such. The truly radical program would seek to ‘dismantle’ the deploy-
ment of sexuality itself (Foucault, 1978: 131). And in the ‘counterattack against
the deployment of sexuality . . . the rallying point for politics ought not to
be sex-desire’, as it had been for the Freudian left, ‘but bodies and pleasures’.
The difficulty is, however, that he is very unclear about what he means by
the slogan of ‘bodies and pleasures’ (Foucault, 1978: 157).

His most extensive remarks on the topic – and they are scant – appear

in his ‘Introduction’ to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a 19th century
French hermaphrodite. Foucault begins with the question ‘Do we truly need
a true sex?’ – by which he means do we really need determinate sex that
can be unambiguously assigned to distinct scientific, medical or legal
categories? Against ‘modern Western society’, which has consistently
answered this question in the affirmative, Foucault answers that ‘one might
have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the inten-
sity of its pleasures’ (Foucault, 1980b: vii). Thus, whatever else it might mean,
‘bodies and pleasures’ appears to denote the opposite of categorically deter-
minate sex.

The case of Herculine Barbin occurred between 1860 and 1870, pre-

cisely the time when the new Scientia Sexualis was carrying out its ‘investi-
gations of sexual identity . . . with the most intensity’. The attempt was being
made ‘not only to establish the true sex of hermaphrodites, but also to
identify, classify, and characterize the different’ (Foucault, 1980b: xi–xii)

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varieties of human sexuality. Foucault claims that in the Middle Ages, both
canon and civil law treated hermaphroditism with surprising flexibility. At the
time of baptism the father or the godfather – that is, the person who locates
the child in a categorical scheme by naming it – assigns the hermaphroditic
infant to one sex or another. They were advised to do this according to which
sex appeared to be ‘the warmest’ or ‘the most vigorous’. However, at the
‘threshold of adulthood’, the hermaphrodite was legally free – a fact that
Foucault emphasizes – to choose whichever sex s/he wanted to belong to,
with the strict proviso that the decision could not be reversed. The adminis-
trative requirements of ‘modern nations’, however, could no longer tolerate
this degree of ambiguity and assigned everybody a location in its classifica-
tory grid. Thereafter, ‘everybody was to have one and only one sex’. Med-
ically, it was now up to the doctors to determine the ‘true sex’ that lay behind
‘the anatomical deceptions’ of hermaphroditism and ‘to say which sex nature
had chosen for [an individual] and to which society must consequently ask
him to adhere’ (Foucault, 1980b: vii–ix).

Foucault acknowledges that contemporary medicine has, to a degree,

‘corrected many things in this reductive oversimplification’ and that we are
much more tolerant of individuals that do not conform to the conventional
sexual categories. But we still suspect, Foucault maintains, that ‘the idea that
one must indeed finally have a true sex is far from being completely dis-
pelled’ (Foucault, 1980b: ix–x).

Foucault locates the Memoirs in this context. Herculine Barbin was a poor

child who grew up in a convent, where she was taken to be a girl and called
by the female name ‘Alexina’. But when undeniable maturational changes
began to transform her appearance in a way that set her apart from the other
girls, a priest and a physician took it upon themselves to determine her true
sexual identity. After a medical examination, ‘the difficult game of truth’ was
finally imposed on the child’s ‘indeterminate anatomy’ (Foucault, 1980b:
xi–xii). As a result, Alexina’s ‘civil status’ was ‘modified’, and she was legally
compelled to change her sex. That Herculine committed suicide not long after
its imposition testifies to the violence that is involved when an individual is
forced to assume an identity. In the Memoirs, written shortly before the suicide,
Herculine seeks to record life in the convent when s/he had retained her her-
maphroditic indeterminacy. Foucault stresses that the erotic fascination with
Herculine’s sexual ambiguity caused a pseudo-imbecility in the other members
of the convent so that they denied what they saw in front of them. He argues,
moreover, that her ambiguous sexuality contributed, in no small part, to the
heightened pleasure of the sexual contacts that are typical of such institutions.
For Foucault, Herculine represents ‘the happy limbo of non-identity’ (Foucault,
1980b: xiii) that exists prior to the imposition of sexual determinacy. The
upshot of his ‘Introduction’ is the valorization of pre-categorical and indeter-
minate sexuality and its assertion against the ‘true sex’ that is imposed on the
individual by the normalizing grid of power/knowledge.

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Foucault tries to indict psychoanalysis as a co-conspirator in this ‘game

of truth’. He argues with some reason that ‘psychoanalysis has rightfully
rooted its cultural vigor’ in the idea that ‘our sex harbors what is most true
in ourselves’ and that ‘we must not deceive ourselves concerning’ it. But he
then goes on to imply that ‘discovering the truth about our sexuality’ really
means ‘discovering that we have one true sex’. Thus the analysts are lumped
together with the normalizers. And it is probably true that most psychoana-
lysts agree that a desirable outcome of an analysis is the appropriation of an
individual’s sexual identity through the deep exploration of his or her uncon-
scious and past. However, a ‘true’ identity, in this sense, is not a uniform or
univocal thing; the notions of constitutional bisexuality and the component
instincts make that impossible. Rather, it is something that must be synthe-
sized out of myriad identifications with both sexes and elements from all the
stages of psychosexual development. Successful identities must, in other
words, be highly differentiated unities that individuals synthesize for them-
selves. More generally, while Foucault wants to hoist Freud on the petard of
naturalism and essentialism, he misses the decisive feature of the latter’s
position. In her excellent introduction to The Gender Conundrum, Dana
Breen has argued that Freud’s theory defies the binary choice between bio-
logical naturalism and essentialism versus historical constructivism:

It is part of the complexity of Freud’s work that his theory has been seen by
some as ascribing an inescapable biological destiny to man and woman, while
others have understood him to uphold the revolutionary belief that, psycho-
logically speaking, we are not born man or woman, and that masculinity and
femininity are constructed over a period of time and are relatively independent
of biological sex. (Breen, 1983: 1)

Breen goes on to argue that this ‘duality’ is not the result of confusion or
indecision on Freud’s part but of ‘an inherent tension existing at the heart of
the matter’. This is the reason, moreover, ‘why this opposition is not going
away and why the debate is still alive half a century after [Freud’s] death’
(Breen, 1993: 1). To use Foucauldian language, human beings are in fact bio-
logical-symbolic doublets.

While Foucault’s position has the appearance of being as anti-utopian

as Freud’s, it is in fact even more utopian than the Freudian left’s. As Peter
Dews argues, Foucault’s rejection of the repressive hypothesis – conceived
of as the opposition between power and its repressed or excluded other –
is more apparent than real, not ‘abolished, but simply displaced’ (Dews, 1987:
168). By placing bodies and pleasures in the position of the repressed other
of the apparatus of sexuality – but not thematizing it directly – Foucault
attempts to finesse his central dilemma. On the one hand, he still retains an
extra-discursive, counter-norm to power which, as Dews argues, the critique
of power logically requires. And, to his credit, Foucault still wants to criticize
power. On the other hand, by leaving the notion of bodies and pleasures so

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utterly indeterminate, he believes he has avoided the twin dangers of natu-
ralism and essentialism. If sexual drives, desire and madness were already
rather indeterminate concepts, bodies and pleasures are even more so. It
assumes the character of pure, unformed matter which can be shaped and
reshaped without constraint. It provides Foucault with the requisite material
for the aesthetic fashioning of the self independently of historically instituted
codes. Whereas Marcuse’s scheme envisioned the repression of polymor-
phous perversity by the reality principle, Foucault’s pictures the exclusion –
it is difficult to know what word to use – of bodies and pleasures by the
apparatus of sexuality. And though Foucault claims to reject utopianism, that
is, the omnipotent denial of our finitude, what could be more utopian than
the infinite malleability of the body and sexuality? As Jacques-Alain Miller
asks, what could be more utopian than this ‘body outside sex’ (Miller, 1992:
63), which is to say, outside desire and prohibition, that can be endlessly
refashioned at will?

Joel Whitebook, who has written extensively on critical theory, is a practicing

psychoanalyst in New York City. He is on the faculty of the Columbia University
Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. The author of Perversion and Utopia:
A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Whitebook is currently completing a
work entitled Fighting Freud: Michel Foucault’s Struggle Against Psychoanalysis.

Notes

1. The claim that power is productive is often offered as a response to the charge

that, according to Foucault’s analysis, power is totalized. We should point out,
however, that, for Foucault, the term ‘productive’ is purely descriptive. It simply
refers to the fact that power generates effects and doesn’t say anything about
the value of those effects – whether or not they are praiseworthy. Indeed,
because he suspects that all forms of normativity are masked forms of normal-
ization, Foucault cannot and will not address the question of how they might
be evaluated. Given, therefore, that the effects of power are intentionally
generated for purposes of social engineering and that Foucault won’t allow
himself to evaluate them, I don’t see how the thesis of the productivity of power
provides an answer to Foucault’s critics.

2. Thomas Laqueur (1990: 12) observes that ‘under the influence of Foucault,

various versions of deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and poststruc-
turalism generally’, the biological body ‘threatens to disappear entirely’.

3. See Sigmund Freud, 1915: 122–3.
4. See Herbert Marcuse, 1970.
5. Consider also his statement that the discourse about repression

is in fact a formidable tool of control and power. As always, it uses what
people say, feel and hope for. It exploits their temptation to believe that
to be happy, it suffices to cross the threshold of discourse and remove a
few prohibitions. It ends up in fact repressing and controlling movements
of revolt and liberation. (Foucault, 1989: 142)

Whitebook: Michel Foucault

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