Abstract

This chapter discusses Michel Foucault's interpretation of the biopolitics of power and of the device of sexuality in Western society, taking into account the possibility of an ars erotica (‘erotic art’) that is both detached from the scientific model of knowledge and truth and related to the use of pleasures and to the practice of the care of the self. If we consider that this contrast is developed in The Will to Knowledge, we must also recognize that Freud, together with Jacques Lacan, is Foucault's main interlocutor, since psychoanalysis is the point of arrival of this modern device that leads one to formulate the truth about sex. Within a genealogical sequence that dates back to psychiatry's disciplinary practices and to the deployment of the examination of consciousness and the direction of pastoral power, the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure in the psychoanalytic experience is reduced to a knowledge of sexuality. Whether by transference into the clinical setting or by the adoption of the repressive hypothesis, Freud’s theory is understood as the development of a social normalization project through the classification of individuals as somewhere between normal and pathological and the constitution of a qualified population. Opposed to this psychoanalytic perspective, Foucault's hypothesis concerns the possibility of a sexual practice that is not reducible to the biopolitics of sexuality. The pursuit of pleasures in such eroticism would be less related to the scientific model of self-knowledge and more related to both the perspective of the care of the self and the conception of an aesthetic experience, as in some examples presented by Foucault from ancient Greece and certain societies in the East.

Keywords: biopolitics, sexuality, society, subject, ars erotica (‘erotic art’)