Mechanisms of intensification
 

Foucault 45: "People often say that modern society has attempted to reduce sexuality to the couple--the heterosexual and, insofar as possible, legitimate couple"
 
But: "[t]here are equal grounds for saying that is has, if not created, at least outfitted and made to proliferate, groups with multiple elements and circulating sexuality: a distribution of points of power, hierarchized and placed opposite to one another; 'pursued' pleasures, that is, both sought after and searched out; compartmental sexualities that serve as surveillance procedures, and function as mechanisms of intensification; contacts that operate as inductors."
 
In short, the social apparatus was "less a principle of inhibition than an inciting and multiplying mechanism"
 
Put another way on 47: "Nineteenth-century 'bourgeois' society [...] produced and determined the sexual mosaic."

> from Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976, translated 1977)

> tagged with #pleasure, #sexuality

> created September 13, 2025 at 8:40:46 AM


> part of unfinished everything


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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

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