Power and pleasure
 

Foucault notes that as power expands to "[take] charge of sexuality" it comes along with "a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure"
 
"The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power
 
"Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered."
 
[see separate note from 2012]
 
In fact, Foucault goes so far as to say "manifold sexualities [...] all form the correlate of exact procedures of power" (47)
 
"Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement." (48)

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

> tagged with #pleasure, #power, #sexuality

> created September 13, 2025 at 8:36:08 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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