2.02.2005
a book a week three: the history of sexuality, vol. 1
this week i read the history of sexuality, vol.1: an introduction by michel foucault (and the fact that it took all week to read it should indicate how slow and easily distracted a reader i am). rather than arrogantly assume i have anything substantial to add to the already-infinite debate surrounding foucault, i'll simply say i found it fascinating, and make three points that sort of evade my usual reviewy-ness...
1. my copy of this book is ugly. though i like to delude myself into thinking "i do not judge a book by its cover," i've spent at least three years in a state of non-commital noodling with this one, and i think it's because its design is so unattractive. i mean, look at it:
it looks like someone took stock footage from a late-eighties PBS documentary and dipped it in a bowl of sherbert. dear vintage books: this one's due for an update...
2. i discovered foucault (in a roundabout sorta way) when i was 20 or 21 i guess. i was very excited to have found a figure who provides a comprehensive & convincing analysis of power dynamics, without resorting to a totalizing "higher cause" of some sort (at least for the most part). i also liked that foucault's skepticism didn't point to some sort of fundamental loss (unlike, for example, jean baudrillard). years later, it would also thrill me to discover that foucault looked like this:
3. i know that as a fellow who reads foucault, i'm expected to be a fun-sucking mad scientist intent on ridding the world of its wonder and poetry (at least that's what a solid 25% of my fellow ex-art students would have me believe), but i must insist that foucault is occasionally a hell of a stylist. no one ever talks about his way with words (unless, of course, i'm merely admiring richard hurley's translation). take a look at this:
Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex. The sex which one catches unawares and questions, and which, restrained and loquacious at the same time, endlessly replies. One day a certain mechanism, which was so elfin-like that it could make itself invisible, captured this sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with compulsion, and consent with inquisition, made it tell the truth about itself and others as well. (vintage books edition, march 1990, page 77)
... not exactly page-turnin' stuff, mind you... but not without a certain sass, either...
1. my copy of this book is ugly. though i like to delude myself into thinking "i do not judge a book by its cover," i've spent at least three years in a state of non-commital noodling with this one, and i think it's because its design is so unattractive. i mean, look at it:
it looks like someone took stock footage from a late-eighties PBS documentary and dipped it in a bowl of sherbert. dear vintage books: this one's due for an update...
2. i discovered foucault (in a roundabout sorta way) when i was 20 or 21 i guess. i was very excited to have found a figure who provides a comprehensive & convincing analysis of power dynamics, without resorting to a totalizing "higher cause" of some sort (at least for the most part). i also liked that foucault's skepticism didn't point to some sort of fundamental loss (unlike, for example, jean baudrillard). years later, it would also thrill me to discover that foucault looked like this:
3. i know that as a fellow who reads foucault, i'm expected to be a fun-sucking mad scientist intent on ridding the world of its wonder and poetry (at least that's what a solid 25% of my fellow ex-art students would have me believe), but i must insist that foucault is occasionally a hell of a stylist. no one ever talks about his way with words (unless, of course, i'm merely admiring richard hurley's translation). take a look at this:
Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex. The sex which one catches unawares and questions, and which, restrained and loquacious at the same time, endlessly replies. One day a certain mechanism, which was so elfin-like that it could make itself invisible, captured this sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with compulsion, and consent with inquisition, made it tell the truth about itself and others as well. (vintage books edition, march 1990, page 77)
... not exactly page-turnin' stuff, mind you... but not without a certain sass, either...
