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Articles

The Government of Desire: A Genealogical Perspective

 

Notes

1 M. Foucault, Qu'est-ce que la critique? followed by La culture de soi. See also M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir, 102.

2 M. Foucault, Dits et écrits, volume 1, 581.

3 Dits et écrits II. 1976–1988, 1390.

4 M. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, 45.

5 The Essays of Francis Bacon, Chapter XXIX, “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates.”

6 M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, 101–02. Emphasis mine.

7 Claude Adrien Helvétius, De l'Esprit (1758–9). Présentation de François Châtelet, 53.

8 James Steuart, An Inquiry into The Principles of Political Economy: Being and Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations, Vol. I., Book II, Introduction, 162–63. Emphasis mine.

9 Ibid., 165, 164.

10 See M. Foucault, Les anormaux. Cours au Collège de France. 1974–1975; Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975; henceforth Abnormal, followed by English and French pagination.

11 I borrow the expression “psychiatric style of reasoning” from A. Davidson's The Emergence of Sexuality. A version of the thesis I'm putting forward here is also developed by Patrick Singy, “Sexuality and Liberalism”, 228–39; and Julie Mazaleigue-Labaste, Les Déséquilibres de l'amour. La genèse du concept de perversion sexuelle de la Révolution française à Freud, 73–83.

12 M. Foucault, Abnormal, 82/76.

13 Ibid., 87/80.

14 See M. Foucault, Abnormal, 283–87/267–71; Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, 4–5; Singy, op. cit.; Julie Mazaleigue-Labaste, op. cit., 127–63.

15 Cited by Dr Henri Legrand Du Saulle in La folie devant les tribunaux, 527.

16 Cited by Dr Étienne-Jean Georget in Examen médical des procès criminels des nommés Léger, Feldtmann, Lecouffe, Jean-Pierre et Papavoine, 44.

17 Ibid., 45 and 46.

18 Ibid., 11.

19 Idem. My emphasis.

20 Legrand Du Saulle, La folie devant les tribunaux, 525, 527.

21 For an in-depth discussion of the history and philosophical consequences of that distinction, see Canguilhem's seminal The Normal and the Pathological.

22 Le siècle, Wednesday 11 July 1849; see also Brierre de Boismont, “Remarques médico-légales sur la perversion de l'instinct génésique”, 559; Jules-Gabriel-François Baillarger, “Cas remarquable de maladie mentale”.

23 See Mazaleigue-Labaste, 134.

24 Michéa, 1849, 339.

25 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 69–70; Alexis Épaulard, Vampirisme, nécrophilie, nécrosadisme, nécrophagie.

26 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (seventh edition, 1895), 53/56–57.

27 Julie Mazaleigue-Labaste, Les Déséquilibres de l'amour, 27.

28 Dr Laupts, Perversion et perversité sexuelles (1895; second edition Paris, Vigot Frères, 1910), 280.

29 It is by recognizing that tension that Freud was eventually forced to posit the existence of a death drive beyond the restricted economy of the purely sexual drives, a destructive desire, oriented towards the self, or towards others, which signalled the limit of the rationality of the sexual instinct as itself a way of understanding the limits of the bourgeois rationality of self-interest. The problem of radical evil, and of a desire that Freud didn't hesitate to characterize as “demonic” in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, continued to haunt psychiatry and psychoanalysis, precisely as the desire that exceeded the economy of sexual pleasure.

30 In fact, the latest version of the DSM recognizes a significant amount of new paraphilias, such as hebephilia, or the primary or exclusive adult sexual interest in pubescent individuals who are approximately 11–14 years old. And, troubling as this may be, they are still defined in terms of cultural abnormality and social deviance. In the face of such a phenomenon, some have advocated the removal of all paraphilias from the psychiatric classification of diseases. See Patrick Singy, “How to Be a Pervert: a Modest Philosophical Critique of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”.

31 The paedophile and serial killer of the first season of True Detective is, of course, a physical monster as well as a moral one, and the large scar on his face the visible sign of his moral depravation.

32 See M. Foucault, History of Sexuality I. The Will to Know; Mazaleigue-Labaste, op. cit., 151–52.

33 Cited by M. Foucault in Abnormal, 283.

34 S. Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, volume 7: 75.

35 Ibid., 77.

36 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 1–10.

37 G. Stanley Hall, op. cit., vol. 2, 109.

38 Arnold Davidson, “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality”, 32.

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